The Role, Approved, and Notes fields don't seem like something we need (possibly also 'Status,' since I'm not sure there's enough retired / dead PCs that we need to sort them out), but the others are pretty much everything we'd be looking for.

It looks like that table pulls from values of pages using the L4W Character Template. That templates a much more elaborate one, visually, than I think we've been going for with the LPF sheets.

Basically, I was trying to figure out how to make the field defines they have there, but make it essentially look like the Basic Info box we have at the top of the current wiki sheets, adding in fields for player and location. I got about as far as identifying the background color, then got hopelessly lost trying to parse the page source / figure out the Templates Wiki instructions to get what I was after.

If it's an easy puzzle for you, it seems like it would take care of a lot of character tracking automatically on the wiki and save some time in the long run.

Good news is "Yep, I can do that."
Bad news is "It is just a glorified hand coded table."

Looking at the code with edit, it is just a wiki style table, with the only redeeming factor being that columns can be sorted. I checked the "7 Rabbit" character and confirmed that the info on the character sheet is not being imported to the table. The table is at third level, and the character is fifth.

So, for the moment, my glorified hand coded tables and divs are just as good.

What we need is a category processor that reads templates. But, I cannot find any of that. On the Approved Characters category, there is something that is doing a for(1,8) get file, get first image, print first image or 50 chars of text, endfor. But I cannot find where it is. Once I find that and clone, I could create new categories that would do the equivalent of the Roll Call page for the DWI by a person just adding the DWI category to their character. Could actually do that now, but only the first eight characters in would get their pics used. The rest would be just an alphabetical list.

So far as I have seen, wiki's have databases as the backend storage for the data, but do not have any access to the database functions for the wiki user or script programmer. The scripts are very, very simple text substitutions, if then statements, and a very few math expressions. And since the text substitutions can be both recursive and interpreted, they are comparatively slow to any real language. If you cannot do something with cut|grep|awk|sed, you are not likely to accomplish it within a wiki. They are designed to be very simplistic and static once the editing is finished.

And the coding is just plain ugly. The eidolon template is about as complicate as I would want to get. A spare space or new line in that one, and it does things you don't expect it to do.

Obligatory: Just my opinion

Besides, free form for our character sheets allows more full and complete sheets. If you take a look at Arianna, she just doesn't fit if I tried to squeeze her into normal fields a character sheet would have that are chunked from a database. Too much is weird. And auto calculating, nope.

I was a big proponent of the current "free form" sheet, primarily because of my experiences with LEB and the complaints I heard about their sheets. Once you get used to them, those sheets are . . . well . . . still a bear for a lot of people. Updating a character takes a considerable amount of time, and accidentally changing any of the coding syntax results in something really ugly. Plus, when you open up those character templates to edit your character it can be really intimidating.

I muddled through over on LEB, but editing my character was always a chore and it seemed like there was always someone asking the judges for help fixing the format on their sheets.

While the end result of our sheet is not nearly as decorative, it's much simpler for the average user to maintain.

"Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats."
-- H.L. Mencken

That was what I was taking a quick look at doing. There doesn't seem to be a way to grab X information from all the pages that are sitting in a category, that is public for scripters to use. The category pages are doing a little bit of what I want, but don't show me any source code that I could expand upon. They also stop at reading eight files in the category.

So I'm having some issues regarding the wiki. For some reason the wiki won't allow me to add catagories to my character sheet. I've been trying to place the character in question into the Unfinished Characters catagory as he's not ready for approval and I'm still deciding on who'll be my first character for play. Any help with this issue would be greatly appreciated.